Resource Conservation and Resiliency

Defense of the nation demands a trained and ready force. The Department of Defense (DoD) relies upon training and testing lands to provide the platform upon which to prepare that force. To conduct its mission, the DoD manages over 28 million acres of natural and built infrastructure.

Upon these millions of acres, soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen train as they will fight. DoD lands provide the contiguous, unencumbered spaces needed to closely replicate the operational environment of assigned missions and the same training lands must be available for numerous units to train time and time again. Moreover, the lands must be maintained to allow both the current force and future generations to train with today’ weapons and the weapon of and tomorrow.

Training time and training land availability link directly to capabilities, but without careful management, training and testing infrastructure degrades and become of limited use for realistic training. Management requires science because management without science equates to guesswork. Wildfires, flooding, exotic species invasion, dust emissions, and other challenges to marine, aquatic, and terrestrial training and testing environments require carefully management. The bottom-line, showed repeatedly through the life of the SERDP and ESTCP programs, is that understanding military lands, their ecosystems, and the installation infrastructure reduces risk and improves resilience. Understanding and, to extent possible controlling, the risk associated with land management supports the imperative of military readiness.

SERDP and ESTCP’s Resource Conservation and Resiliency program area supports the development of the science, technologies, and methods needed to manage DoD’s installation infrastructure with the goal of maximizing the number of training days and mission readiness. Areas of investment include managing threatened, endangered, at-risk, and invasive species; improved wild land and beneficial fire management for test and training ranges, and enhancing the resiliency of DoD infrastructure